Q: “To Mr. Gregory Elder, I am an elderly citizen, 99 years old female, who came to the U.S. in 1920. I live in a nursing facility. I was born in Mexico, thus a migrant and took a train. I enjoy your articles that appear in the paper on religion. I was raised Roman Catholic but due to incidents, I kind of lost some of my faith. My question is why have religions failed? Or do people just not care for human life? Don’t we all worship the same God? Like I said before, stuff has happened to me. I still believe in God but not in religion.”

A: This hand-written letter comes to us from Claremont, but let me begin with an apology for whatever bad or evil thing happened to you.

Gregory Elder, a Redlands resident, is a professor of history and humanities at Moreno Valley College and a Roman Catholic priest. This photo is from about 2017. (Courtesy Photo)

But to answer your central question is very difficult. Most people who have studied this would agree that attendance at religious services has declined. But it is hard to say if that indicates a lack of faith. Many people attend religious services once or twice a month or once or twice a year, but still regard themselves as members of a religion.

The following statistics are taken from the Gallup polls: In the United States, the state with the highest percentage of weekly attendance in a church building is Utah at a rate of 70 percent. The lowest attendance is Maine, with 31 percent. California clocks in at 45 percent. The national average was 36 percent of the population attended weekly services in 2014, which is down from a high of 49 percent in the 1950s. By way of comparison, the nation with the highest weekly church attendance is Nigeria at 87 percent. The nations with the lowest attendance at church services is hard to establish given that they are certainly in totalitarian states. In the free world, Sweden is among the lowest at 5 percent.

Many of the polls that research this question focus on Christianity but other faiths have similar results. According to the Pew Report, there are 6.8 million Jews living in the United States, which is higher than in Israel. Only a third of all American Jews are affiliated with a synagogue, however, and only 23 percent attend services at least twice a month.

There is no one reason why religious attendance is in such decline, but there are a number of factors in place which have at the least influenced the long, slow retreat from faith. In these remarks I shall focus on the United States, and shall not discuss contentious points of theology.

First, it must be noted that since World War II, Americans have become much more mobile. A great many people change their city of residence several times in their lives. This author has lived in at least eight different cities, not counting foreign lands. When we lived in an age when immigrant groups settled in a given area, their religions stayed with them, often in the language of the lost motherland. Southern Indiana once was home to a huge number of German Catholics, Minnesota was full of Scandinavian Lutherans and Michigan was full of the Dutch Reformed Churches. But their children have spread across the nation in the past three generations, and when they left they did not always find a congenial congregation in their new home.

Second, it should be remembered that in the decades since the Civil War, the United States shifted from being an agrarian state to an industrial one. The factories created new jobs in new cities, calling people away from their ethnic homes. But beyond simple movement, it is a historical reality that nations that undergo an industrial development process also go into a religious decline. Christianity from the time of the Roman Empire was normally tied to the routine lives in farming communities, where religious observance was kept alive with traditions, customs and the local culture. People ate soul cakes on All Souls Day, pancakes and fatty meats on Shrove Tuesday, and prayed for the fields on Rogation Days. Devout farmers gave their farm animals more or special food on Christmas Eve, because it was the beasts which first welcomed Jesus at the manger. Alas, all those village customs disappeared in the furnace of industrialism and factories which had little time or place for priests or ministers blessing the fields at planting.

Third, it must be said that the spread of higher education has contributed to the decline of religious practice. This is not to say that religious people are dullards or that Darwin proved religion to be wrong. It was, after all, the Catholic Church that invented the university. But epic numbers of schools which once had a faith foundation have secularized. In the earliest days of Harvard University, the academic primary goal was to produce Congregationalist and Unitarian ministers. Suffice it to say that this is no longer what they do.

Beyond academic agnosticism, the entire curriculum of what it means to be educated has changed. To cite one example, in 1820, Indiana University was founded in the Midwest and there were two majors the students could study, Greek or Latin. Later, Hebrew was added and so study of the scriptures was very prominent. Mathematics was part of the curriculum with an emphasis on Euclid. Today, the university offers almost 200 different majors and the number of students who study the classics is very small. The shift away from antiquity in favor of more modern subjects led people to neglect the Judeo-Christian heritage, with long-term consequences.

Finally, this author would like to point out that more than one religious community has declined because of the failures of the ordained clergy. Discretion forbids a detailed discussion thereupon.

Gregory Elder, a Redlands resident, is a professor of history and humanities at Moreno Valley College and a Roman Catholic priest. Write to him at Professing Faith, P.O. Box 8102, Redlands, CA 92375-1302, email him at gnyssa@verizon.net or follow him on Twitter @Fatherelder.